Originally Posted by
Carbonfiberboy
Good for you. One-legged pedaling is good for everyone. The odd thing is that, if one has two normal legs, pedaling one-legged one can't stress one's aerobic system. There's just not enough muscle involved. So it's actually a good recovery thing to do.
Very interesting statement. Thinking back to it I would have to agree. You really can't push too hard. Granted I wasn't trying to either since I didn't think I had much cassette room to play around with. Ever since I started riding single speed, on a regular cassetted bike, I have just went through the gears one at a time until they were junked out...or so I thought. After getting the derailleur hanger replaced, 3-4 days after I started one legged riding, I'm now coming to learn my bent hanger was causing premature 'failure' of the gears. I'm right now riding on cogs I thought were toast. As a result of thinking they were toast I was pretty much only riding as big a 52x22 and not trying to ride anything bigger. Here in western NH I have hills everywhere to deal with and there are a couple where I have to down shift, one legged to a 36x22 or 25 to make it up them and I'm still only riding along at 25 rpm at 4 mph. Nice training for mountain biking even though I don't do any mountain biking
I never tried, but I plan on it now, to see if when riding in the bigger gears one-legged if I could actually push it enough to 'make myself sweat' or not. In the smaller gears I kept running into the problem of pedalling faster than I could spin so I was clunking between 10 & 2. I think toward the end I may have been getting up as high as 70 rpm...MAYBE, at the best before I would start clunking. Since I wasn't willing to ride the bigger gears I would just stop pedalling and coast along until I slowed down instead of continuing to pedal faster. If I would have been willing to upshift I may have been able to push myself. I'll have to play around with it some and see what happens. You have my interest stirred.